Osteoporosis Alert: These Yoga Poses Could Be Dangerous!

Transcript

so let me say first I love yoga I've got a lot of clients that really enjoy yoga and as part of their everyday exercise routine yoga is great for strength balance flexibility obviously to help relieve stress improve relaxation however if you have osteoporosis there are a number of things that you need to be careful about everyone welcome to the channel at Dubuque physical therapist from integrated physical therapy in Bellingham Washington so Elizabeth and I are both physical therapists and Elizabeth is way into yoga she's a certified yoga teacher and we did a video together about how there are certain poses that you really need to avoid or modify so she talks about a lot of the common poses pigeon pose child's pose spinal rocking how to hamstring stretch how to modify pigeon so sit back get yourself a notebook something to write down some notes and continue to practice yoga just a little safer in this video we're going to talk about specific yoga movements that we think we should probably avoid and then where possible can you show us some modifications maybe for the exercise I will try to do that some of these positions are just going to be a no especially depending on what kind of yoga you're doing so I'm imagining some of you being in a yoga class and saying oh which ones of these can I do which ones can I you know should I not do and so I'm going to give you about six that you're things that you're going to avoid and then try to just like conceptualize this and transfer this over two other postures because most yoga classes have in a series they'll have forward folds and we really want to avoid forward folds now the one that I want to talk about today the forward fold is called Ragdoll so Ragdoll a really really common forward fold this is how Ragdoll looks Ragdoll looks like this and they're usually saying dangle your hands and just let your body flow back and forth okay this is one example of where you would see Ragdoll oftentimes it's used as a first part of the standing series you are challenged with osteoporosis you really do want to avoid that that's just a pure forward flexion that we don't want you to be doing okay instead when the teacher is having people hang out there you can just be in standing you could do just Mountain pose and really just take that moment to breathe and to Center yourself and to feel your feet side to side just really slow everything down and imagine letting go and follow her cues only just transfer it into Mountain pose if you want to further that you might take it up into tree pose and just give yourself a little balance challenge okay if if you're in the middle of a flow class and you're doing sun salutations so some salutations look something like this let's say you start and down dog and then you could flow up here you usually start here in a forward fold you come up here and then you go back to your forward fold then you engage your legs and you come on up so you can see there was a couple Ragdoll forward folds in there and you really want to avoid that so instead of doing that whole flow you might consider doing a different kind of yoga class do a Hatha Yoga class or a yin yoga class poses are more isolated as opposed to flowing one into the next because even going from down dog two we're still extending we're still okay here but I've got to get my foot through and then I'm really flexed already now if you're right in the middle maybe you'll go like this down dog you'll come down to tabletop but you still have to make your way up to standing pose and so if you're down here on all hands and knees what you could do is go into a half kneeling and then go to or sorry tall kneeling to half kneeling and then just stand up from there and that would be the safest way for osteoporosis this is way we would talk to our patients we would teach them to get off the floor correct yeah because part of it the issue is too is transitioning in in and out of the pose so like if somebody wanted to just get down on the floor to do a yoga series sometimes it's challenging to work to get onto the floor right A lot of people will just do this and let themselves down but once again we've got all this flexion of our thoracic spine our lumbar spine that we don't want and so just to kind of echo what you were talking about oftentimes I'll have people put their strong leg forward use a supported hand if they need to and come down to here keeping your back still nice and straight kick this leg back come down onto your hands here and then you can side sit and then do whatever you would need to do and then when you want to come back up you would roll onto your side first come up to here hands and knees whichever your strong leg is come forward use your hands if you need to or a chair for support and then you would push yourself up again yeah so of course you might have to modify your class too yes and this is why I'm I'm giving you an an idea to maybe take a half a class you might see a class that is described as Hatha as opposed to a power flow or a Vinyasa those are very flow classes that have a faster Pace that doesn't they don't give you a lot of time to adjust in between each pose you can still do the poses but just isolate them so that you can customize in a Hatha class you would have plenty of time to do this transfer of you know kind of slowly especially if you're doing this at home going down onto one knee down here and down here there's plenty of time to do that in a hotha class now what about spinal rocking like I've seen I've taken some yoga and I've seen some spinal rocking yeah so what he's talking about with spinal rocking is let's say we're here and we've done something and the teacher says go ahead and they won't always say you have to rock yourself up but they'll give that as an example and spinal rocking is like this and sometimes I want to do that to engage your core and then they want you to come up like this some teachers end up like that not me yeah but that's what they're talking about with spinal rocking but you can see that that's full flexion so they probably want to avoid spinal rocking definitely want to avoid spinal rocking instead you want to instead of spinal rocking you're just gonna come to your side keep your spine as much in neutral get up onto your knees and then strong leg press into your knee and come on up so now plow is another full flexion I don't do a very pretty plow but we don't want you to anyway look at the amount of flexion she has her thoracic spine and cervical spine and so I get really nervous when I see anybody doing plow that doesn't even have not necessarily osteoporosis but any type of spinal issue I just get really nervous because of the pressure it puts on that thoracic spine yeah it doesn't it's a lot of pressure here it's a lot of pressure through the ribs so instead of instead of plow plow is um really getting your feet above your head and they're actually folded over your head so one of my favorite inversions it's still an inversion and it's a safe lovely relaxing inversion is legs up the wall I do this a lot in my class and you just can be here and it's it's pretty straightforward to get here with a neutral spine and to get out come down roll to your side and then come on up and then reverse you just want to make sure your bottom is pretty close to the wall from the beginning so so get your bottom touching the wall and then you'll go to your side and then you'll just go up your bottom should be touching the wall and then you're fully supported and then you have your nice inversion where you know you get that relaxation the blood's draining from your legs and it's just amazing that's a much better alternative than the plow much better it's more comfortable and I just think it's um easier to get into it's safer now what about uh seated like let's say you're in a class whether it's yoga Pilates what have you and they're doing a seated rotation I get a little nervous yeah because of the loading of the spine so by a seated rotation Ed means really anything that is like this yeah like this right and so you want to avoid any rotation a lot of times you'll see this in yoga class where they want you to rotate right that's a seat of rotation another seated rotation is this when you're doing twists or rotations we want your spine to be unloaded and what that means is that you're going to be on your back or in sideline and my very favorite rotation to show people is this it feels really really good you're inside lying your spine is unloaded you can put a pillow underneath the back arm so if you feel like a strain anywhere along your spine you can bring that arm up and support it one thing to remember too when you're down here is that you don't want to force that rotation you might want to go maybe to about 75 80 percent but not necessarily definitely don't ever want to push it down I mean living life without rotating especially when you're standing and sitting and rotating isn't really functional but what we're talking about is the repeated rotations that we might do in class because it from a functional standpoint I might not just sit there and rotate over 10 times to One Direction that's not very functional but I might do something like that if I'm in a stretch class and that's when you need to say okay you know what I shouldn't probably be doing so many seated repeated flexion twist exercises and that's when you want to come down here and lie down and do something that's unweighted okay the next posture we'd like you to avoid is something called pigeon and this is where I'm going to show you like you're still okay here but you have to really flex your spine to get your leg up and to attain pigeon okay once you're here you're actually okay your spine is actually an extension yeah it is putting some compression through the hip but yeah definitely compression through here and if a lot of people are tight they can't get this neutral spine and they end up getting a lot of flexion not only from the lumbar spine but from the thoracics and I guess this is where something Elizabeth like would a one-on-one help like if someone isn't sure because everyone's coming in a different place yeah I would definitely recommend a one-on-one because even these that we're going to say here in your mind you're going to be like oh well that reminds me a lot of this and that reminds me a lot of this and then you're going to get into your yoga class and it's going to be a little bit stressful and you're going to be like this is really counterproductive to what I want to get out of yoga and so I think you know yes so they can even do one-on-ones with you yes you can do one-on-ones with me or anybody local to you well we can do it on Zoom oh we could easily do it on Zoom so reach out to us and Elizabeth will be able to do that absolutely I'd be really happy to do that if you'd like to do it on Zoom um so now instead of pigeon and a lot of people even who don't have osteoporosis take this as an alternative you get down on your back and you're going to do a figure four same thing but your back is unloaded and in neutral and it's just safe and lovely and then you're just going to reach through and the thing you want to remember about figure four is you don't want to be up here because you can see my spine is flexed here you want to be able to grab your legs and keep your spine on your spine and your head on the floor and if you can't you can get a towel or a band another another modification would be is to do it up against a wall yeah so pretend I'm the wall right here that way you could come in a little closer to the wall if you want more of a stretch but that way your back is nice and straight and you're getting a nice hip stretch but without straining on the spine child's pose is really really common and it's almost it's so common it's our reset pose a lot of times if you're feeling fatigued in a yoga class or it might be the way you start in the yoga class or they suggest as a you know as your home base so child's pose traditional child's poses like this where your knees are apart your toes are together you're reaching your hand forward and you're coming back head is down so once you get here you can be in neutral some people don't have that much extension of their spine like this some people can't put their forehead on the ground and so instead of going through and wondering am I in my inflection what you can do is just keep yourself in neutral so that might take stacking up some cushions so here we go so keeping yourself in neutral here and what you're after is a nice flat back notice she doesn't have that hyperkyphosis through her thoracic spine as well too and if she didn't use her fist go ahead and drop down for me do you see how she starts to get a little kyphotic through here so then bring your fist back up again and then she's just nice and flat through here which is just a great substitution another thing that that we often do in yoga class is a hamstring stretch that might look like another we in yoga it's usually a combined movement and so we have our spinal twist and hamstring stretch so better in these cases for osteoporosis we want to isolate those out so we already talked about the spinal twist we want to do that on the side on the back unloaded starting off in neutral and we talked about the figure four and when you're doing your figure four you could just take you could take a strap and just do your hamstring stretch here and really let it be comfortable for your back and so you're just thinking here about hamstring now another thing you could do if you're next to a wall hamstring and you can get a little bit of the inner thigh stretch too just make sure you have something to rest your foot on and this is really really really nice stretch for the hip for the hamstring and for the inside of the thigh in the next video the fun stuff the yoga poses that we encourage you to do all right everyone if you've made it to the very end of the video congratulations hopefully you learned something remember you can work one-on-one with Elizabeth as well too if you ever want to zoom or a Tilly session to kind of get dialed in on what you need to do all right if you haven't subscribed please consider doing so so you never miss another one of our videos all right thank you very much and take care to the next video